Bug#640826: bad arg to "-e" kills all terminal windows

[Guilherme de Siqueira Pastore]

package gnome-terminal
severity 640826 minor
tag 640826 unreproducible
quit

On Wed, Sep 07, 2011 at 02:32:43PM -0400, Eric Cooper wrote:
> I eventually realized that I need to use "sh -c ..." as the argument
> to -e, but while debugging this I found that this incorrect form:
>     $ gnome-terminal -e "sleep 1; foo"
> causes all my open terminal windows to exit, rather than simply
> producing an error message.

Hi there,

I cannot reproduce the "causes all my open terminal windows to exit". As for
the rest, it is not gnome-terminal that exits with no error message. If you
don't pass a shell as an argument to -e or -x, you have no shell to parse the
semi-colon, which then gets passed to /bin/sleep, which in turn exits without
actually sleeping first, like this:

gpastore at natrium:~$ sleep 10\;
sleep: intervalo inválido de tempo "10;"
Experimente "sleep --help" para mais informações.

That is, running 'gnome-terminal -x sleep 10' should sucessfully run
/bin/sleep inside the terminal, passing it '10' as an argument, whereas
running "gnome-terminal -e 'sleep 10; blah'" should run /bin/sleep inside the
terminal, causing it to fail by passing it '10; blah' as an argument.

I'm reducing the bug severity and tagging it unreproducible for now. Any
further information you can provide is appreciated.

Best regards,

Guilherme de Siqueira Pastore
gpastore at debian.org